House GOP leaders are pitching reforms to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program as they try to get a farm bill to the floor, while top House Democrats hit President Donald Trump on his plan to lower the high cost of prescription drugs. (May 16)
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The government isn't letting the public know where food stamp payments go. We ought to, since we're paying for it.

A customer swipes a food stamp card at a Kroger store May 12, 2008, in Columbus, Ohio.(Photo: Jay LaPrete for USA TODAY)

Raise your hand if you’ve heard this story before: A mammoth piece of legislation gets introduced in Congress. It weighs in at hundreds of pages. Buried within those pages is tens of billions of dollars in spending. And hiding within its nooks and crannies are goodies that bestow legal benefits to chosen industries or interest groups.

In the not too distant past, we called it crony capitalism. More recently, those kinds of maneuverings have been dismissed as swamp dealings.

The latest chapter of “Swampland: How Government and Industry Collude to Protect Government and Industry” is found in the U.S. House version of the 2018 Farm Bill. This year’s version of the Farm Bill is unusually partisan, as Republicans seek to roll back reforms ushered in during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations that made it easier for people to qualify for food stamps, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP.

The prospect of cuts to one of the country’s biggest safety net programs doesn’t sit well with various groups, most notably the grocers who sell the food in what is currently a $70 billion-a-year transfer from taxpayers to the food industry. During the Great Recession, grocers, gas stations, discounters and other food retailers fell over themselves to get into the SNAP business, which went from a $25 billion program in 2004 to a nearly $80 billion program by 2013.

That’s a lot of money. And folded discreetly into the Farm bill’s 643 pages are two provisions that would ensure the public doesn’t know who is getting that money. The provisions bar the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers SNAP, from making public retail-level sales data.

Who put them there? As is typical with these types of special-interest favors, they don’t have fingerprints. They show up — poof — like magic.

Their inclusion was no accident, however. Last week, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Paul, Minn. ruled that retail level SNAP sales figures are public information. The ruling could be the final legal hurdle in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Argus Leader newspaper of Sioux Falls, S.D., which would make public the annual SNAP sales figures of every retailer that profits from the program.

The USDA, which had previously defended the lawsuit, lost after a rare Freedom of Information bench trial, and in January 2017, the agency was prepared to release more than a decade of sales data. The Food Marketing Institute (FMI), an industry trade group, intervened in the case and appealed to the Eighth Circuit.

Oral arguments were in March. They didn’t go well for FMI, and when Rep. Mike Conaway, the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, released the Farm Bill in April, the two secrecy provisions were included.

FMI and the National Grocers Association have argued that releasing SNAP sales figures would somehow expose retailers to competitive harm. That competitors would somehow be able to glean a store’s total revenue if their SNAP sales were known. That argument was debunked by expert witnesses for the Argus Leader, one of whom a former economist for USDA, and rejected by four federal judges who have reviewed the case.

On Tuesday, following the Eight Circuit ruling, the National Grocers Association released a statement calling SNAP sales transactions just another form of payment to stores.

Well, they aren’t. They are payments that come from the taxpayer. The Argus Leader has practical reasons for wanting the sales data that don’t need to be discussed here. But underlying the entire seven-year legal battle to win the data is a fundamental belief that taxpayers deserve to know who is profiting from their labor.

Throughout the last seven years, the Argus Leader has received numerous inquiries from food activists, university researchers and even public officials in New York City and California who think the sales figures could be used to make SNAP a better program.

They won’t get a chance if the reptilian swamp creatures of Washington have their way.

Jonathan Ellis is an investigative reporter with the Argus Leader and a former correspondent for USA TODAY. Follow him on Twitter: @argusjellis